Thursday, October 24, 2013

ROGATE post on grades

Lately in our ROGATE class, we have been discussing the topic of grades. The purpose of grades is to see how well you are doing in school. It is also designed to let you know what are your worst subjects and your best subjects. Grades are also used to help decipher how smart you really are, coming from some teachers.

My opinion of the current grading system is that it is very easy to keep track of your grades and see how well I am doing in class. However, whenever I get a bad grade, I always try to bring up the grade, when I should be trying to learn what I missed during the lessons. I wish that the grading system told you more about what you missed on the tests or during the class, rather than just giving you a letter or number grade which tells you zilch.

I do not think that this grading system accurately represents your understanding of the lessons in this class. This is because a teacher could give someone extra credit when other students may not have the ability to do the extra credit, resulting in an unfair grade (this has happened to me once but I forget about what) . Also, if a project is late, every day, a teacher could take off a certain amount of points and their grade would not show them that they fully understand the topic, when they could have gotten a 100%, although it was late. This also results in an unfair grade.

I believe that we should use a combination of both of the grading systems because people still need grades to see their improvement, but their should be separate grades for preparedness and extra credit or responsibility. This is because they do not let you truly know if you understand the topic or not.

1 comment:

"Grades are also used to help decipher how smart you really are, coming from some teachers." What do you mean by this, exactly?

"However, whenever I get a bad grade, I always try to bring up the grade, when I should be trying to learn what I missed during the lessons." Exactly! I am so glad you see this, Alex. We get hyper-focused on the NUMBER, rather than the skill or content. And I think that can be dangerous.

In your closing paragraph, you said we should use a combination of "both of the grading systems" but you never actually used the phrase "standards-based grading" or explained what it is.